


Heart of the Universe

by Paraprosdokia (ChangeableConsistency)



Series: Unconnected Phil Coulson Fics [15]
Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel, Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Angst, Feels, Fluctuating Age Differences, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pancakes, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:48:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23954851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChangeableConsistency/pseuds/Paraprosdokia
Summary: After an unfortunate accident with an 0-8-4, Phil finds himself zapped to the future where Captain America is alive, AIM is good, and, oh yeah, he's a superhero.And that’s not even the weirdest part.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Phil Coulson
Series: Unconnected Phil Coulson Fics [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1709944
Comments: 8
Kudos: 61





	Heart of the Universe

Phil wakes up on a bare mattress in a musty, unused room at SHIELD HQ. He takes a deep breath and lets himself cry for a little bit. 

He thinks it’s warranted; after all, today’s the day he dies.

~~~

“Phil!” Phil has never heard his name said with so much emotion, “You know, part of me was hoping you wouldn’t be here, that maybe you’d be able to pull off one last miracle. If anyone could do it it would be you.”

“I’m sorry, do I know you?”

The old man— well, not  _ old _ old. Maybe 50? — takes a shaky breath, “You said this was going to be hard, I mean, this whole year has been hard, hasn’t it? But this… You’re right, maybe you do get the better end of the deal. At least you know that you never have to live without me.”

“What? I don’t— are you okay, sir? Is there someone I can call for you? I’m sure there’s a pay phone around here somewhere. Wherever here is?” Phil phrases it as a question hoping the man can help him out. 

One second the 0-8-4, marked ‘extremely fragile, handle with care’, is slipping through Phil’s notorious butterfingers and the next  **bam** ! He’s tripping over himself in an alley in what certainly smells like New York. 

No where else has quite the same combination of food, sweat, exhaust, and urine. 

At least he hopes he’s still in New York. Otherwise he’s not sure how he’ll get home. 

Oh, God. He hopes he doesn’t have to call his SO to bail him out. Fury’s already going to be pissed that Phil’s screwed up yet  _ another _ assignment. One that was supposed to be Phil-proof.

He’s starting to think maybe there’s no such thing as Phil-proof. 

He sometimes wonders if SHIELD made a mistake recruiting him out of Stanford last month. Maybe he should look at putting in his two weeks. He’s just not SHIELD material. Phil’s pretty sure he can still get the committee to honor his acceptance to the History department’s doctoral program; it’s not like the term has started yet. 

“I’m sorry,” the man says, wiping away a tear under his dark glasses, “It’s just. This is the day we meet; and I knew it was coming. You prepared me for it, or tried to, and it still—,” the man is suddenly hugging him, “Oh, God, Phil. What am I going to do without you?”

“Uhhh,” Phil carefully pats the man’s back, “Don’t worry, sir. Everything’s going to be okay.”

He hiccups and squeezes Phil tighter, “Of course you're comforting me right now. You really are perfect, you know.”

He lets go, sniffs, and clears his throat. 

“Alright,” he continues with false cheer, taking Phil’s hand and walking him out to the street, “So, because you don’t think any of this is real and it’s our last day together, we’re going to do all the things we love. Tomorrow, your tomorrow, we’ll go into AIM to see if this can be reversed. I think you were humoring me towards the end, more than anything, but I can’t tell you,” he sniffs again, “I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you try so very hard to make it back.”

“AIM!? So this is their doing. Okay. Okay, this is above my pay grade but I can call Agent Fury and—.”

“Phil,” he interupts, “Fury passed almost ten years ago.”

“What? No, I just saw him this morning he—,” Phil breaks off as he gets his first good look at the city.

Well, it’s definitely not Kansas.

It takes him a few seconds to recognize the Edison across the street, the whole side of the hotel is showing an advertisement in 3D, without needing glasses. It reminds him of the Jaws scene in that Back to the Future sequel that came out a couple months ago. 

“So. This is the future and you know me.”

“Yes. Umm, it’s also a bit more complicated than that? C’mon, let’s get pancakes and we can talk. These sorts of things always go easier with pancakes. Brooklyn’s is still around, just celebrated its 100th anniversary and everything; it’s your favorite. Or, I guess, will be.”

~~~

“You know, security around here is surprisingly lax.”

“Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my office?”

“I’m Phil Coulson.”

“Bullshit. Phil Coulson died seven years ago. Tell me why I shouldn’t call a pair of agents to escort you out right now.”

“Your birth name is Marcus Johnson.”

Fury stands and pulls his weapon in one smooth motion. Phil knows he could disarm him before Fury has a chance to react, but that’s not how this goes. Phil casually shuts the door behind him and sits down at Fury’s desk, crossing his leg with an ankle on his knee settling comfortably into one of the guest chairs. Or trying to settle. The chair is quite a bit more uncomfortable than the ones Fury gets after his promotion. The important thing is to project the image of being confident and in control; Fury always reacts well to calm competence, “You can put that way. You’re not going to shoot me,” Phil shrugs nonchalantly, “Probably.”

“You’re awfully relaxed for ‘probably’.”

“In about eight hours, you're going to put me on a plane to Turkey so that I can recruit Hawkeye for SHIELD. Yes, that Hawkeye. Shooting me would make that rather difficult. Though not impossible; which is why the ‘probably’. Just in case, I waited until you had your second cup of coffee before luring your secretary away. Don’t blame Carlos, I can be very convincing,” Phil grins, “Also, I don’t think Clint could have kept his mouth shut for the last 23 years if you had shot me.”

“Explain.”

“Well, the last time you saw me, I was down in Archives cataloging 0-8-4’s, right?”

“How do you know that? Did you torture Coulson for information about us, about our codes? You may look a little like him but you're too old, for one, to bold for another.”

“Ouch. Also, I’ve been waiting a very long time to tell you this story, so it would be great if you could sit your ass down and let me get to the good bits. Preferably limiting your interruptions to oohs and ahs; maybe a little appreciative laughter. Don’t worry, there will be a Q and A at the end.”

“You’re definitely not Coulson. You don’t act anything like him. If you were him you would be a lot more deferential. Hell, he would have made an appointment.”

“Oh, fine. I hate it when you don’t let me be dramatic, but it’s a code 3-74G. Now, will you please stop looming?”

Fury glares at him for another full minute but Phil lets his silence speak for him. 

Fury sighs, holsters his gun, and sits; Phil’s pretty sure he only concedes because his arm is tired, “I’m listening,” he holds up a hand, “I’m not saying I believe you, but I’m listening.”

~~~

“Alright, say I believe you and this isn’t some sort of drug induced fever dream or alien mind powers or even run of the mill time travel, and there really is no way back for me but the long way, so to speak, why don’t I just wait until the day after— before? I trigger the 0-8-4 and tell myself not to touch it; or, wait, if I can’t interact with myself without imploding or something, what if I just destroy it?” 

The ‘BROOKLYN’S OLD FASHIONED SODA FOUNTAIN, est. 1931’ painted on the window casts its shadow over their booth. Agent Clint Barton, if he really is an agent, requested ‘their’ regular booth, one that lets him look down Henry and Sackett, both of which he has been keeping an eye on. It’s casual and seems automatic; the same behavior Phil’s observed in the field agents, though a lot more subtle.

So, he probably is an agent, though apparently for AIM, which was purchased by some rich kid, who cleaned house and took over from SHIELD after it was revealed that SHIELD had been infiltrated by Hydra from the very beginning. 

Yeah, Phil’s going with fever dream. 

“Causality.”

“Causality?”

“Yep,” Agent Barton says, as he drenches the remaining bites of his pancakes in a truly colossal amount of artificial syrup. Phil opted to upgrade to the pure maple syrup because he has standards, “You don’t destroy the Heart of the Universe because if you did you wouldn’t be here. You're here, ergo you didn’t destroy it. 

“Also, it disappeared when you did. We tried to track it down, but it could be anywhere in time and space for all we know, or maybe it was consumed or whatever when it popped you out here. Also also, in a couple years you start to believe it may have literally been the heart of the universe and if you destroy it, you destroy all of reality. Next question?”

“What about paradoxes?”

“The Novichek self-consistency principle. Wait no. Damn, I always get that wrong,” he frowns for a second and then his face clears and he snaps a finger gun at Phil, “The Novi _ kov _ self-consistency principle.”

“What’s that?”

“Basically all the time travel that has ever happened is already factored into how the present is. Reality is a CTC— uh, a closed timelike curve, and paradoxes aren’t possible.”

“What about free will? If you already know everything I’m going to do, and I know everything you're going to do, how do any of our choices mean anything?”

“You try not to learn too much about the past, you say it keeps things interesting, that it’s all about the journey. As for telling us what happens, you play it pretty close to the vest. You do let us know sometimes when something big is going to go down. Natural disasters, for one. For the next couple of years, you try to tell us things that would change your past and our future, but something always happened to prevent it. The harder you try to change things, the more dramatic the universe seems to get in trying to stop you.”

“How so?”

“For example, you’re going to try to give me today’s lottery numbers tomorrow, but first you freak the fuck out, which is understandable, and you forget about it until lunch. You start to tell me as we’re crossing the street and we nearly get hit by a car, the only reason we don’t is because I’m warning you about it now. Then a little bit later when you try again I get tangled up with a dog walker and, even though you try to stop it, all of the dogs get loose and we spend a couple hours tracking them down.”

“Do we get them all?”

Agent Barton’s smile plucks at something in Phil. You know, for an older gentleman, he really is quite attractive.

“We do.”

“Okay so what else happens tomorrow?”

“Nope.”

“‘Nope’?”

“Keeping things interesting. Hey, Mel,” Agent Barton says as their server comes over to top of their coffee, “Did Ellynor happen to make French silk today?”

“She did. You both want a piece or are you sharing?”

“One each please. It’s Phil’s first day in the future.”

“Oh, honey,” she leans over and gathers Agent Barton into a hug, “How are you holding up?”

“About as well as can be expected,” he says, returning the hug. 

She lets go of Agent Barton and holds her hand out to Phil, her handshake is firm without being too much, “Well. It’s an honor and a pleasure to meet you, Phil. You take good care of our Clint. Try not to let him fall off of too many buildings.”

“Jump, Mel, jump. I don’t fall.”

“Really? You’re telling me that last Christmas was intentional.”

“Semi-intentional, at least.”

“At best. I’ll go get your pie, Hawkeye. You two stay just as long as you need, and don’t you worry about the bill.”

She bustles off; she seems cheerful, but Phil notices her surreptitiously wiping away a tear.

Phil pushes away his plate, already full of carbs with pie on the way. Agent Barton drags it over to his side of the table and carefully drops the last of Phil’s pancakes into his lake of syrup before proceeding to pour even more syrup over the top of them. 

“You seem to know a lot about all this. Are you a physicist of some sort?”

Agent Barton laughs around a mouth full of pancakes, chokes, swallows, and clears his throat, “God, no. It’s more like… you know how chronically ill people usually know a lot about how hospital bureaucracy works? You've got a sort of chronological illness. You age backwards. Or well, to the world you age backwards. For us, it’s like you keep getting younger while having amnesia and precognition. From your perspective, each day forward is a day into everyone else’s past.”

“So how does this work exactly?” 

“Okay, so the way you’ve explained it, at 8:04 in the morning, eastern standard time, the world becomes a Salvador Dali painting made out of Jell-O shots, directed by David Lynch and David Cronenberg’s love child on acid and ecstasy.”

“That doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

“Oh, you  _ hate _ it. Never get used to it. It’s why you try to sleep through it when you can. It only lasts for a fraction of a second. You remember how long it felt from when you were in the Archives until you were in that alley?”

“A heartbeat. Maybe less? That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“Yeah, the teleporting is more of a problem, or, I guess from your perspective, it’s really more about finding a place to sleep. Sometimes you make sure you’re awake and get into position before,” Agent Barton laughs, “Saved our asses with that more than once. For us it’s like you appear out of nowhere; for you, you stay in place and the day changes around you. Though a lot of the time for me, it’s just like you change your position in bed, like you’ll be sleeping on your back and suddenly be on your side.”

Phil feels himself blushing. He’s terrible at dating, at human interaction in general; he’s not sure how he managed to attract someone as impressive as Agent Barton, “So, can you tell me when we meet? I’m assuming from your ring and your greeting we’re… Married?”

“The marriedest. And, uh,” Barton looks into the distance, seeing the past, “Ugh. Bandaid off, Barton,” he mutters to himself, before looking Phil in the eye and if he had thought he had seen grief in the man’s eyes when he had removed his glasses, it’s nothing compared to what he sees now, “I kill you.”

~~~

All told, they don’t get to Istanbul until after noon Turkish time, the muezzin’s call to Zuhr echoing through the city as they travel to the safehouse. 

Phil knows the STRIKE team better than his own family, but to them he’s an unknown. An interloper. He’s tried to prepare them as much as possible for what’s about to come. 

At 2:30 he starts to get nervous. 

Anxious. 

34 minutes to go. 

God, he’s not ready. 

At the last second he tries to thwart fate one last time, knowing it's hopeless, but unable to not make the effort.

For that second, that brief shining second, he thinks maybe Clint won’t shoot him and even as the arrow flies he thinks this one time maybe Clint will miss. 

Clint’s arrow pierces Phil’s heart at 3:04.

“I’m sorry, old man,” Clint says, regret staining his features, “But I gotta look out for me.”

“It’s… it’s okay Clint. I forgive you. I love…,” he doesn’t get to finish, his last breath not quite enough to carry the word, and he should have said it sooner, and he should have said it more. There’s so much he wishes he had done, so many things left to share with Clint, but it’s over. 

As Phil’s watch ticks over from 3:04 to 3:05, his body disappears.

~~~

“What’s with you?”

“What? Nothing.”

“Clint, you know you can’t keep secrets from me. Not yet.”

“Okay, yeah. You did know I have a surprise for you, buuuuuuuut, I don’t tell you what it is and it’s still a surprise. So, you can pester me all you want but you know I’m not telling.”

“Unless you’re lying about not telling me?”

“Would I do that?”

“Absolutely. So what is it?”

Clint laughs, “Nope! You have to wait until yesterday.”

“Hmmm. We’ll see,” Phil slides his hand from Clint’s knee up the inside of his thigh; he affects an accent, “We have ways of making you talk.”

“Oh, really? I’ll have you know I’m a world class spy trained in the art of resistance by the best.”

Phil smiles and drops the accent, “Well then, this may take a very, very long time.”

“Oh, God, I hope so.”

~~~

“I killed you.”

“You did,” Clint had turned white as a sheet when Phil came into the interrogation room to sit on the opposite side of the table he’s handcuffed to. Phil desperately wants to hold him, to pull Clint into his arms and give him a proper goodbye, but that’s not what happened, “It’s complicated. I’m here to give you a job offer.”

“I almost kill you and you want me to work for you?”

“Not almost. And technically for SHIELD, but yes.”

Clint laughs hollowly, “They sure have a way of rolling out the red carpet.”

Fury’s team hadn’t been exactly gentle with Clint when Phil had gone down; from their perspective, Clint shot him and then Phil disappeared. 

“I apologize. I would have tried to ease the transition, but I’m going to be a little busy being dead.”

“Why would you want to recruit me if I killed you? Or, I’m guessing your twin? Nice trick that. I am sorry about your brother, you know. It wasn’t personal.”

“You won’t believe me for a while but that really was me and I really do forgive you. Now, you're well aware of what you have to offer SHIELD, let me tell you what we’re going to give you.”

Clint laughs, “Yeah, sure. Let me guess, a cot, three squares, and a short leash.”

“Oh, no; more than that. Much more than that.” 

~~~

“Phillip Jay Coulson.”

“I died. I was supposed to die. I did die, didn’t I?” Phil is in a white void, in front of him is an amorphous cloud that appears to be made of stars and space. The voice came from that direction. It sounds like his favorite teacher, Mrs. Polaski from third grade, and as he thinks it she forms into a reasonable facsimile, though one made of galaxies and emptiness. 

“You did.”

“So, this is the afterlife?”

“Close. This is where you get to choose your afterlife.”

“Can you send me to the one with Clint?”

“No,” she sounds regretful.

“Why not?”

“That I cannot tell you.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Eternity.”

“Eternity?”

“I am the metaphysical embodiment of your universe.”

Phil needs a moment to breathe. When he’s collected himself he asks, “So, the living manifestation of the universe guides us to the afterlife? I suppose there’s a bit of poetry to it.”

“Not everyone. Only a special few.”

“Why not Clint?”

“I will not break the laws of causality, not even for you, Heartbreaker.”

“Will not? Not cannot?” Phil asks.

“They are the same.”

“Okay, so why am I special?”

“You broke my Heart, Phillip, and in doing so freed me from eons of imprisonment. It is why I have done what I could to aid you.”

“Aid me? Are you why I went backwards through time?” 

“Yes. It was that or let you be destroyed entirely and I owe you far too much to let that happen. I did what I could to give you a full life.”

“Then give me Clint. At least let us share our afterlives.”

Eternity is quiet for a bit and looks pensive. She says softly, almost vulnerably, “To do so I would need to unmake myself.”

“There must be some other way,” he demands, then continues in a whisper, “Please. He’s  _ my _ heart.”

Her blackhole eyes stare into the distance of the blank white nothingness.

“No. I will assist you anyway I can within the limits of my reality, but no further.”

“Is there anyone who can help me  _ outside _ the limits of your reality?”

“No,” she says, but her answer is too quick, too sharp.

“There is, isn’t there?” 

Phil stares the universe down until she sighs.

“There is one. Franklin,” Eternity says the name with no small amount of disgust and what Phil thinks may be a hint of fear, “He doesn’t exist within me. My counterparts with a Franklin Richards are,” her strange cosmos filled face looks pained, “Unbalanced. And contagious. He could create a pocket universe for you and transfer your consciousnesses there where you could live out new lives together, and from there it could be possible for you to have a joined afterlife.”

“How do I get to one of these universes? How do I find Franklin?”

She looks uncomfortable. 

Phil waits. It’s not like he has somewhere better to be. 

Yet. 

~~~

“Phil? I… I died. Is this heaven?”

“Sort of,” Phil says, brushing Clint’s hair off his forehead in a doomed effort to control his bedhead. They’re laying in bed in their apartment, soft light and a gentle breeze coming in from the window. Phil’s only been awake a couple minutes, but he had been content to watch Clint sleep with quiet awe, letting him wake naturally. 

“You look so young.”

“You do, too.”

“We were never young together. Where are we? What happened?”

“I have more patience than the universe; I stared down Eternity and made a deal with a ten year old.”

“Oh, well that explains it then. Is there still a Brooklyn’s? If the clock is right it’s just after 8 in the morning.”

“8:04. Well, 8:05 now.”

“Pancakes?”

“Pancakes.”

Phil pulls Clint into his arms and draws Clint’s head in to gently press his lips to Clint’s. It’s a kiss full of hope and desire and love, and he could continue kissing Clint forever. He rolls them until he’s on top, deepening the kiss.

Pancakes can wait until tomorrow. 


End file.
